It takes both man and woman to make a baby; it ought to involve both to murder one, says Alexander Krutov, a deputy of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, the Duma, told Interfax news agency.

"Above all, the bill is based on the concept of parental equality," said Krutov. "The decision to give birth to or murder a baby is an enormous one and it should be made by the parents together."

Krutov and his colleagues in the Rodina party proposed a bill in the state Duma that says the husband must also sign a consent form to allow an abortion. The Rodina, a coalition party called the Motherland-National Patriotic Union, is one of the four parties that control seats in the Duma.

"Two hundred thousand women have their first abortion every year. I hope this initiative, if developed, will mean that the embryo murders would be less," he added. Russia's total fertility rate is 1.28 children per woman and in 2005, the abortion rate had outstripped its birth rate.

In May this year, Russia's President Vladimir Putin identified the low Russian birth rate as the country's most pressing problem. Combined with increasing morality rates and emigration, Russia's abortion rate is creating one of the world's worst demographic crises. Russia's population is declining by about 700,000 people annually.

In September, as part of the proposals to address the population crisis, the Duma heard a proposal to impose higher taxes on those Russians who remain single and childless. This is the first time, however, that abortion has been directly mentioned as a significant part of the problem.

Vladimir Serov, the deputy director of the Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology Centre at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, told the Russian media source Regnum that 120,000 women are injured each year from legal abortions. Subsequent sterility is among the most common side effects of surgical abortion.

The frank use of the term "murder" by a high-level politician might shock some who are more accustomed to the polite euphemisms employed in the western political debate over abortion.

In the West, for decades, the abortion movement, having to contend with a strongly Christian and conservative social background, created and disseminated euphemisms like "tissue," and "products of conception," for the unborn child, and carefully framed the debate in terms of "choice" for women.

Although feminist academic elites are recently becoming more frank, the assertion that abortion kills a child is still taboo in most mainstream media, legislatures, courts and universities.

Russia's abortion culture, however, grew directly out of state Marxism, a radically materialist doctrine that forthrightly proposes that a human being has no worth except as a unit of economics. The Communist Soviet Union in 1921 became the first nation to formally legalize abortion.

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